Make your own bread!

One of the most important things you can easily make yourself is your own bread. It is astonishingly easy to make, and no special equipment beyond a normal oven is needed (forget bread making machines!). Most people fear making bread because of the kneading. However, the following recipe does not require kneading. No need for kneading! (one of my favorite English sentences).

Making bread yourself has a lot of advantages. For one, it is much healthier. Bread you buy in the supermarket contains upwards of 20 ingredients, most of which are stabilizers, which are not necessarily healthy. They even manage to sneak high fructose corn syrup into your bread somehow... another reason is just the quality of the bread. If you have a good bakery close to you, good for you. For those that don't, and would like a bread with great texture and crust, you have to roll your own. Finally, it could save you, admittedly, very little, money.

A basic bread has only four ingredients: flour, yeast, salt and water. Of course, you can add more things, and different types of flour, but I like sticking to the basics!


The bread recipe is as follows:
combine 4 cups of flour (for example 3 cups of white flour with 1 cup of whole wheat flour) with 1 teaspoon of salt and 1/2 teaspoon of yeast and mix well. Add 2 cups of water (a little more if you increase the whole wheat flour proportion) and mix well. It should be a kind of viscous mass, not a dough that you can manipulate (it's very sticky). Let rise for 8-18 hours (in an emergency, as little as 2 hours will also work). Pour into a heat resistant cake form that is greased with olive oil and dusted with flour. Bake at 425F for 50 minutes.

I obtained this recipe originally from Peter. He has it on his facebook page.